Before the deregulation of international communication services, carriers interconnected their networks based on bilateral agreements and associated accounting rates. Deregulation, however, has spawned intense competition, sending carriers scrambling to reduce their costs to stay competitive. Thus, carriers are constantly searching for new, cheaper routes with specific characteristics. Carriers strike new bilateral agreements at an accelerating rate, each with its own service level agreement and accounting rates. At the same time and for the same reasons, the useful lifespan of these agreements is shortened as each carrier continues to look for (and find) better deals.
As described in co-pending application Ser. No. 09/213,703, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, many of the problems arising from this bilateral agreement model may be overcome by adopting an exchange model for the trading of telecommunications services. The exchange model connects the networks of multiple carriers through a limited number of interconnection nodes, permitting carriers to seek, find, and interconnect to better-priced networks without requiring new agreements and interconnections. Each carrier needs to reach only one agreement with the operator of such an exchange to enable interconnection with any other carrier so connected.
Since the exchange model requires contractual agreements between each participating carrier and the exchange operator, it is important that the agreement be standardized so that it has uniform meaning among all participating carriers, and can provide a feasible basis for trading communication services.
But such contracts characterize services using a large variety of possible parameters, many of which may take on any one of a plurality of values. Examples of such parameters are origin and destination, quantity, type of service (e.g., circuit-switched voice, fax, data, video, messaging services, voice mail, e-mail, paging, universal mailbox), transmission technology employed e.g., ISDN, ATM), coding technology used (e.g., voice codecs, data compression techniques), signaling method used to control the interconnected network (e.g., SS7, H.323), voice quality of service (VQoS), reliability, security of transmission, post dial delay (PDD), answer seizure ratio (ASR), price, and the term of each agreement (beginning, ending).
When contracts are negotiated on a custom basis (as is the case with bilateral agreements), matching the characteristics of services required with those of services offered is the subject of negotiations between the parties and is addressed in the final agreement. In the exchange model, however, interconnection remains fixed while contracts may change in quick succession; this requires the automation of negotiations and resulting operational transitions. However, automated matching of required and offered services is often impractical when the number of specifiable parameters and the value assigned to them is large. The number of combinations possible when n parameters are specified and each may acquire m possible values is n to the power of m. The large number of potential combinations of features drastically reduces the probability of matching all the parameters of a service required by a buyer with all the parameters of a service offered by a seller.
The problem is exacerbated by the variability of parameters (such as those associated with quality) over time. Typically, the exchange operator is responsible for monitoring service quality to ensure that it continues to meet the requirements specified by the buyer. In practice, this monitoring may reveal significant deviations between the promised and delivered quality of service. In that event, the exchange operator may swap, in real time, circuits meeting the contracted parameters in place of the ones that violate the contract. When the number of possible combinations of parameters is large, the probability of finding a suitable circuit in real time is small.